Harvey Weinstein ‘mentioned Charlize Theron and Salma Hayek while trying to pressure woman into having threesome’, court hears
Trial is in its second week of testimony
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Your support makes all the difference.Harvey Weinstein mentioned Charlize Theron and Salma Hayek while attempting to pressure a woman into having a threesome, a court heard on Wednesday.
Dawn Dunning, who described herself as an aspiring actor, took the stand as a witness, telling jurors that Weinstein allegedly groped her and demanded sex in exchange for film roles.
Dunning, now 40, said she met Weinstein while waiting tables at a Manhattan nightclub. She testified that during one meeting at a boutique hotel in the SoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan, where Weinstein was using a suite as a temporary office, Weinstein led a 24-year-old Dunning into a bedroom and they sat down on the bed.
“I was wearing a skirt that day and he put his hand up my skirt,” she testified. “There was no red flags or alerts that would make me expect it to happen.”
Dunning said of the alleged incident, fighting back tears: “I stood up. I was in shock. He just started talking really fast. He said, ‘Don’t make a big deal about this. It will never happen again.”’
She said she “just kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt” when Weinstein said it would never happen again. She said she didn’t scream or yell and didn’t tell anyone because she was embarrassed and didn’t want to be a victim.
Dunning said that she later agreed to meet Weinstein at a cigar bar, but that an assistant took her to a suite where the producer was standing in a bathrobe.
There, she said Weinstein showed her a contract for three movie roles she would get on the condition she had “a threesome with his assistant”.
“When he said that I laughed. I thought he was kidding,” Dunning said. “He got really angry; he started screaming, ‘You’ll never make in this business. This is how the industry works.’”
“He was a big guy; he was towering over me. I was really scared,” Dunning testified.
She said that during the tirade, Weinstein mentioned Hayek and Theron, as if to persuade her that complying would be good for her career.
On Wednesday, prosecutor Meghan Hast asked Dunning whether she was gaining anything by testifying at the trial. Dunning responded: “No, if anything I’m losing. This is the worst and hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Dunning is one of several women who have been called to the stand as part of the prosecution’s effort to show an alleged pattern of predatory behaviour on Weinstein’s part.
Weinstein, 67, is charged with performing a forcible sex act on one woman in 2006 and raping another woman in 2013.
The producer has pleaded not guilty and denied all allegations of non-consensual sex. He has also denied retaliating against women.
If convicted on the most serious charges, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Later on Wednesday, jurors heard from another woman named Tarale Wulff, who said while choking back tears that there was no stopping Weinstein as he allegedly grabbed her by the arm, pushed her onto a bed and raped her at his New York City apartment in 2005, during what was supposed to be an audition.
Wulff, now 43 and a model, told the court she froze, thinking that would make it “easier to get through, to get past it.”
She also testified that on an occasion before the alleged rape, Weinstein allegedly grabbed her arm as she served cocktails at one of his usual Manhattan haunts, led her towards a darkened terrace and started masturbating.
Wulff said she froze and scooted around him to go back to the bar.
Weinstein’s lawyers raised doubts about Wulff’s recollection, after she disclosed that she had worked with a therapist for a year to fill gaps in her memory. For instance, Wulff said, she had no clear memory of how she and Weinstein’s clothing came off.
The defence attorneys also questioned why Dunning waited until last summer to tell prosecutors that Weinstein had allegedly fondled her after she had gone public with the jobs-for-sex allegation, first in an article in The New York Times in October 2017.
Additional reporting by agencies